Make a Fortune by Learning From – or Teaching – Others

Looking to knock the ball out of the business park?

All you need to do is start examining and evaluating and analyzing what other people – inside and outside of your industry – are doing. Then you borrow their better-performing processes that give you the best long-term success.

I had the good fortune of collaborating and consulting with W. Edwards Deming’s organization. I also got to work with a company that was the leading force in the field of multi-variable testing. Here, in a nutshell, is what I learned from them …

Every business mechanism can be broken down into its driving processes and sub-processes. Once you figure out what the processes driving an activity are, they can be measured, they can be quantified, and they can be vastly improved.

Each process (and there usually are 15 to 20) in a revenue-generating activity, production activity, operational activity, financial activity, or personnel activity can be improved anywhere from 3% or 4% all the way up to 2,100%. If you can get a 3% to 2,100% improvement in as many as 10 different processes and in as many as 50 or more different elements of your business, that translates to enormous and significant and massive growth possibilities!

W. Edwards Deming was the man who turned the Japanese industrial organization from schlockmeisters into the most formidable in the world – just by teaching them this science of process improvement.

He showed the Japanese that a process occurs whenever you run an ad, take a sales approach, produce a product, manage inventory, manufacture something, shift something, deal on the phone, handle a complaint, perform a service, or take an order. And there is massive room in that process for improvement. There are business activities that can be vastly improved … always!

When you figure out how a given process currently performs (which is nothing more than analyzing, monitoring, and measuring it), you can then find other people in your organization or other people in your industry or other people doing the same function outside your industry who are doing it much better, faster, easier, safer, more productively, more effectively, more profitably.

All you’ve got to do then is figure out what they do that you don’t do – the strategy they use and the tactics. What drives their strategies, what is the mindset that sustains it, the key lessons you must know to maximize the model or borrow their higher-performing methods? Then you put it together into a simple application, add it to what you’re doing (or replace what you’re doing with it), and that process will perform tremendously better.

You may also want to look at processes that you have knowingly or unknowingly perfected – processes that are far superior to those that anyone else in your industry or any related industry uses. Because you can take your successful processes and – once you quantify and measure them – you can sell them, license them, or joint-venture their use for a share of the improved result they produce for other companies.

Here’s are some examples:

I had a lumber mill client who had a process for kiln-drying lumber that was two times more effective, saved 40% more energy, and reduced waste by 80% more than what 90% of all the other lumber mills were experiencing. That client was able to sell $2 million a year in training and licensing of this process to other lumber mills that wanted it.

I had a real estate agent who could list four times as many homes as most agents – and she was able to make $1 million a year teaching other agents how to list homes.

I had a car wash client that developed a technique for getting four times as many people to buy a hot-wax upgrade. He taught 2,000 other car washes how to do it … and made more money doing that than he did from his own car wash.

I had a dry cleaner that created great ads license them to 5,000 other dry cleaners.

What do you do in marketing? What do you do in selling? What do you do in operations? What do you do in effectiveness? What do you do in management that’s greater than the way 90% of the other people out there do it? What do you do in money managing? What do you do in achieving high productivity?

What do you do in any measurable element of your business that you could do better by learning from others … or that you could teach others to do and get paid for it?

Ask yourself those questions. Answer them by looking outside, looking inside, and measuring how well things do or do not perform … and you could make yourself a fortune.